Gaki N Me If you love to talk about the world, love Asian idols, this is the place.

This is a book by a social worker who was required  to take down notes of the bed ridden old folks on the way out. She recorded their life stories or whatever they recall. But along the way, she decided that she has learnt so much from them that she asked them four standard questions for this book: What they wished they knew when they were young; what advice they would give to a young person; who taught them a valuable lesson in life and if they could live their life over again, what would they do differently if at all. It was a very pro-active book that urges you to drop every nonsensical thing you are doing and take hold of your life and do what you really want to. Sigh...very good book. These old folks ranges from 60-102, many of them bed-ridden and not many years left.  The following passage was the most telling and it was at the back cover of the book. My middle son read it and immediately read it to his sister to remind her also. Now he had it hung up in his room.

Make your days worth remembering

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This classic The Little Prince (full text) was published in 1943 amid World War II by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the French aviator.  I read this in French when I was around 14 as part of my French lessons one on one at my school. At that time, I focused so much on the construction of tenses and sentence structure that it baffled me why as I read, my French teacher kept shedding tears.  Over the years, I tried to pick it up again to reread it but I always got distracted along the way. Tonight, I read The Little Prince: A Reverie of Substance by James E. Higgins, a professor of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Queens College, City University of New York, in which he explained the background to this story.  

 
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This is not a full poem but only part of it. Ko Un himself is an activist and when he was young, the teacher asked the children what they would like to be.  Ko Un answered, "Emperor" (of Japan). He was studying at a Japanese school in Korea at that time and so was promptly suspended for three months.  On his return, he was asked the same question again, he said, "A mailman."

I wanted to be a man who delivers messages from one man to another.
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I keep you there
on the horizon of my heart.
Forever
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No matter how much
we talk about stars,
they stay
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Everyone forgets something. 

Forgotten things
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我離開了哪里,
哪里就成為我所懷念的家.
我到達了哪里,
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The wind blows
all by itself.
You are grass
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I don't want to speak.
How can I tell the same story?
Insist on always the same topic?
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